He began painting his phantasmagoric landscapes secretly at night, working as a night watchman in a Gulag camp. He kept that style for the rest of his life.
On February 9, 1946, nineteen-year-old Boris Sveshnikov, a student at the Moscow Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts, was arrested on his way to buy kerosene. He was accused of belonging to a "terrorist group" supposedly plotting to assassinate Stalin, a charge that was entirely fabricated. He spent nearly a year in prison under night interrogations, shuttled between the Lubyanka and Lefortovo, before being sentenced to eight years in the camps.
The transit to Ukhtizhemlag alone took more than a month. Sveshnikov spent close to three years at the camp, digging trenches and laying gas pipelines ten to twelve hours a day in temperatures as low as minus forty. When his strength gave out, he was written off to the camp hospital, helped by a family friend, a geologist who intervened on his behalf. In the autumn of 1948 he was transferred to an invalid camp near Vetlosyan, where he became a night watchman at a woodworking factory.
That post gave him something he had lacked for years: time and a private space. At night, in the watchman's closet, Sveshnikov drew in pencil and ink, supplied with materials thanks to his proximity to the camp's painting workshop, which produced banners, posters and portraits of Stalin. There he also secretly painted small portraits for fellow prisoners, who sent them home to relatives. He later recalled his camp years with irony, calling them a time of "absolute free creativity," since no one took any interest in his drawings or checked on them.
After his release in 1954, Sveshnikov kept the manner he had developed in the camp: ghostly figures, foggy landscapes, fantastical scenes with no clear time or place. "Fog of Transformations," ink on paper, was painted in 1994, four years before the artist's death, and carries the same shifting, dreamlike reality as his earliest drawings. Sveshnikov once said of his own work, "All of my works are dedicated to the grave," and he never considered himself a dissident, even though he is remembered as one of the most significant nonconformists in Soviet art.
